I can believe it. My 80-something grandma believes everything the talking head on TV says (although she calls black guys on TV "colored boys") and even got vaxxed after she caught the virus in 2020. My grandpa before he died criticized her for that and so does my dad and some of my uncles. But let's remember that old women are proven to be the most vulnerable demographic to scams, so don't blame them for being scammed by the government.
I find that pretty strange when you compare it to New England (which is Atlantic Canada's cultural kin). The places most hardcore into it are the bugman-infested parts like Connecticut, Rhode Island, cities in Massachusetts like Boston, parts of hippie-infested Vermont. But then you have New Hampshire where you can visit state run liquor stores (awesome prices) or any restaurant and no one wears a mask. It appears Maine also fiercely contests these mandates although a narrow minority of Democrats manages to dominate. And hell, even in Connecticut where I was at an outdoor event last summer, barely anyone wore a mask.
Do people in rural New Brunswick and Nova Scotia really like lockdowns? In New Hampshire, seemed like no one liked that shit. It felt like I was back in a deep red state, where no one wears a mask except employees of grocery chains and the token elderly person even back in 2020. I always assumed that people in that part of the world were just hardcore fishermen/mountain men/foresty types who didn't give a shit about a virus so much as survival, and that extended to living in all the economically deprived towns in that region since a student of history and economics knows how fucked over most of Atlantic Canada has been alongside other economic bullshit in New England.